The Lazy Student's Guide to Campus Life

Maybe your grandparents had to walk 10 miles uphill (both ways) to get to school, but technology is making it so that you don't have to walk pretty much anywhere. Without too much trouble, you could lie in bed with your notebook PC all day and still have a very rich college experience.

Webcam Fever

At Ithaca College webcams in the laundry room mean you can log on to your PC and check out whether there are any machines available. You can also see if the machine has finished spinning or if the dryer has finished drying. The service, Laundry View, even lets student receive email notifications about when the machines become available.

At Elon in North Carolina, webcams let you check out the crowds in the bar, cafeteria, and snack shop with streaming video. Too crowded? Wait until later. Is the cute person you've been meaning to talk to there? Go now.

At Penn State, you can watch engineers in class building their projects and maybe learn a few things as you watch.

Cornell University's Hi, Mom! webcam makes it OK to never write home again. All you need to do is sit on a bench outside the bookstore and wave at Mom. (See photo of Hi, Mom! and notice the absence of a queue forming to say hi to Mom.)

Real-time web cameras are also in Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington's cafeteria (why go when it's crowded or you don't like the food?). Visitors to University of Redlands in California and Ohio Wesleyan University don't need to travel. They can watch students doing their things from cameras situated around campus.

Don't want to make a trip to library? At Georgia Tech you can chat with the librarian.

At Rutgers you can invite your professor into your room for a review session. These are conducted on the school's campus TV network or delivered as webcasts.

Don't Miss A Trick

Dartmouth has dozens of RSS feeds and podcasts to keep you informed. There's the school paper, the school's game scores, and interviews with various Dartmouth staff to name a few. And it's all up so that it comes via email to you anytime something new appears on the site.

Missing a class is no big deal either now that more and more professors put their notes or entire lectures up on the web. Some use text notes or Blackboard technology, a system for writing notes on a special board and them having them delivered electronically to students. Others are podcasting their lectures with audio and sometimes video.

University of Texas' (Austin) website houses the World Lecture Hall. It publishes links to pages created by faculty worldwide who are using the web to deliver course materials in any language.

Distance learning is no longer relegated to those who live a good distance from campus, either. A recent study by South Dakota's Board of Regents found 42 percent of the students enrolled in its distance-learning courses weren't so distant: The students were located on campus at the university that was hosting the online course. Washington State had about 325 on-campus undergraduates taking one or more distance courses last year; as many as 9,000 students took both distance and in-person classes at Arizona State last year. In North Carolina, one professor was selling his lectures online for $2.50 a pop, but was subsequently asked to stop by the school administration.

With technology you can get through four years of college and almost never have to leave your dorm room. But if you don't watch out, that Freshman 15 (the weight gain normally associated with the campus diet could mushroom to the Freshman 30.